Tuesday, May 9, 2017

12 Days to Departure

We have been pretty busy over the last two weeks. We bought our plane tickets and made our first AirBnB booking in St-John's. We will be spending 3 lovely nights in a 1 bedroom apartment on Water St. Training rides continue and we had our first flat on April 26th. It was our very first late evening flat on a fully loaded touring bike. Under the glow of our headlamps, it would have been romantic had it not been for the mosquitoes.We continue to chat with people and give away travel cards. We even had an offer for dinner and a place to sleep in Chelsea, QC (see map below). We surprised many of the road cyclists when we rode up to Pink Lake Lookout in Gatineau Park. Towing trailers, we managed to pass a few cyclists while going up hill. 😉 (Hélène strongly encouraged me to add the following: "The cyclists we passed were stopped on the side of the road in order to take our picture.")We got a complete overhaul of the bikes as we did for the first trip. New chain for Hélène's bikes and new break pads for the both of us. Like most people we watched the television coverage of the floods in Gatineau and Rockland in areas that we have cycled to and through often. The Day 25 video was filmed on rue Jacques Cartier, in Gatineau, that is now mostly under water. On May 7th, we took a walk to the Rideau Canal, Lock #1 to see how high was the Ottawa River. You can see from the images below just how high the river is and it is expected to rise even more by tomorrow. At this time of year, the Ottawa Water Level (WL) is normally 42 meter above sea level and on May 7th, it is 45 meter and rising.As excited as we are about starting our trip, it is impossible not to feel saddened by the hardships that thousands of people are now experiencing in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick. As I worked on this post, Hélène read to me the latest Facebook entry from her brother in Rockland, Ontario.We hope that the waters peak soon and that affected people everywhere can begin to look forward to the end of this tragedy. We have updated the Experiment Page by adding a map of our future Alaska/Yukon/BC trip in 2019.